Jan Carlzon, president of Scandinavia Airline, wrote a book titled 'Moments of Truth' in 1986. The basic idea of the book is that decisions are like processes which are comprised of various critical moments in which the product must be better than the competition. The most important moments need to [...]

Must win battles on the path to purchase weiss
2017-07-15T17:34:21+00:00

Marketing Science deals with the fundamental principles and laws of marketing, the side of buying and the side of selling. Its goal is to develop generalisable knowledge and scientific laws, which forms the basis for evidence-based marketing. Marketing Science begins to influence the marketing profession fundamentally by de-mystyfing many marketing [...]

In March 2015, I completed my MBA thesis on "Marketing Performance - Improving marketing core activities through empirical consumer and shopper insights in the FMCG sector". The thesis analysis which marketing factors are important for brand growth and market penetration and what this means for the management of marketing, innovation [...]

In a complex and fragmented media world, it is increasingly difficult to maximize the return on investment of the media budget. Thoughtful mass marketing, the continued presence and consistent advertising (to refresh memory structures) is necessary to growth and defend the market share. A budget distribution across multiple media leads [...]

Digital technologies have already affected the purchasing behavior fundamentally. A highly complex ecosystem has changed how we interact with brands and buy products. The use of digital technologies affect every step of the traditional path-to-purchase: Explore, Search, Locate, Purchase and After Sales. The new path-to-purchase is much more dynamic and [...]

In most companies product development concepts are tested on their market potential before going into market. Since many marketeers (and their bosses) heavily rely on the test-results for giving green light to continue with the next phase, it is important to understand how this testing actually works. In more than [...]

Design for growth from Design Council on Vimeo. The video above is an introduction into the "Design for Growth"-initiative by the British Design Council. Design is a cross-cutting theme in the UK government’s Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth and the British Design Council supports this with parallell papers and [...]

With shrinking design budgets due to the financial situation in many companies, design managers, like most professions, are trying to explain themselves and justify their value. Occasionally, efforts made in this cause appear too obsessive. Terms like key performance indicators, critical success factors and performance management systems are becoming part [...]

With shrinking design budgets due to the financial situation in many companies, design managers, like most professions, are trying to explain themselves and justify their value. Occasionally, efforts made in this cause appear too obsessive. Terms like key performance indicators, critical success factors and performance management systems are becoming part [...]

Recently I found the compendium of design and development processes by Dubberly (How do you design?). It is the most comprehensive collection of design and development processes models in architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and software development I have ever seen. The aim of this project was to bring together [...]

New buzzwords are dominating the design management discussion here and there, most recent in the design thinking debate. But are you sure which fashions are worth to follow? How do you decide in which issues you are going to invest time and money? Certainly, other disciplines are facing [...]

With shrinking design budgets due to the financial situation in many companies today, design efficiency comes into the fold. Terms like Key Performance Indicators, Critical Success Factors and Performance Management Systems are becoming part of the lingo of design managers. While design effectiveness is focusing on “doing the right things”, [...]

The interplay of design effectiveness and efficiency weiss
2017-07-15T15:08:21+00:00

Design is one of the major European resources and is increasingly seen as a key element of successful and innovative companies. The European Union has recognized this and initiated the current only Design Management Award, which last year marked the fifth time. Its goal is to promote innovation in small [...]

It's not ground-breaking that design managers, like others, can learn a lot by looking over the horizon of their own discipline and can benefit from smart ideas and concepts translated to their own business. In fact, history shows that design management has always been inspired by disciplines like architecture, change [...]

What design managers can learn from brand management! weiss
2017-07-15T15:08:47+00:00

Last week the 15th European Design Management conference took place in Amsterdam, organized by the Design Management Institute. Every year the conference brings together design management professionals, to discuss and listen to hot topics in managing design. This year the conference was co-chaired by PARK (my former employer) and the [...]

Game storming - The ten essentials by Gray, Brown and Macanufo (click image for downloading PDF) Games are a perfect mechansim for organizing collaboration, creativity and networking. The structured, scalable and social format allows to deal with complexity, wicked problems and uncertainties in a very flexible and thought-provoking [...]

Last Saturday I visited the Danish Design Center (DDC) in Copenhagen and was surprised to see a large poster (3x3m) that we created for our client LEGO. It was part of the exhibition with the topic The result of good partnership - 10 examples of successful design. The exhibition presented [...]

Searching for "design management" in the internet delivers thousands of results: Designdirectory: 1.445 agencies DMI: 2.126 members Amazon: 5.489 books Wordpress: 194.501 blogs Google: 1.160.000 websites Bing: 612.000.000 websites Design management is multifaceted and there are many different perspectives on the definition of design management. In 45 years, we still [...]

Design managers in technology-oriented companies often face the challenge to create awareness for design throughout the company. Many design related decisions are made by employees with no or limited design knowledge. Those people are not educated as designers, but make decisions that have an impact on the final design of [...]